Ryan gazed on the last of daylight’s fading, serenity marred by near sounds of highway passings, white lights in movement to the east and red to west into and out of the near town. Dogs barked, agitated and vocal for reasons they couldn’t explain but struck at something in them just as people held too tight on leashes or enclosed in fenced in lives without the liberty to explore.
There were years too when he’d wished to bark and voice; but there comes an age when one realizes one’s own incessant voice is their most prominent disruptor to self-peace and, no matter the volume, energy, or incessance—noise for noise’s sake—is mostly ignored or lost in collective competition; drowned away in a sound that has no soul, no music, no spirit.
No one cares, and no one listens.
In the thought, geese passed in flight above—whistle of wings and low honks of the guide at point—and his eyes drew to the softer sounds of purpose.
Soon, the fields would dry and spring’s busy would begin. First in fields of wheat, tillered, growing again from winter a winter dormant that would soon shock and race in rise and deep green color that neared to blue and black when take of the fertilizer showed in leafed expression.
Next would be the fields of corn, fresh turned earth, dark in its opening and show of till led and ready seedbed. Over it, for days and weeks on end, he would plant from one field end to the other, back and forth, finishing all as the first planted broke in line and row from the deep, rich brown. He would start in the mornings, beginning in yellow morning light and keep in steady paths, back and forth, through falling of the sun—fire sky, then twilight cool, indigo line between last daylight and night above before onset and cede to stars.
That was where he found his peace, in the open spaces, beneath wild skies, tending to the piece of earth that was his to love and tend for the time he was alive; enriching and improving what was his to care until he too returned to earth and feed to future life.
Traffic still moved. Dogs still barked, but soon he would return to life and purpose that gave him distance from the senseless noise; peace in the engine whine and steady pull in seed of life to fallow, waiting fields.
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It happened then, too, in the open spaces—with twilight’s sign of indigo thread binding light of world to the of dreams—when he would move from one life into other; dreaming as distant star on mind-spirit romance that was his and night’s alone.